Retail telephony

OpenWengo softphone should be clear winner among softphones in the future.
It is supported by Neuf Telecom, a french VOIP -to-PSTN carrier and worldwide community of developers. The concept which could bring more ''fruit'' so smart companies.

The main difference, for example, related to Skype or Gizmo is that it talks SIP , the source code is GPLed ( general public licence ) . Only the codecs are part of the problem which could be clear up with advent of free audio and video codecs.

Which brings me all to the old news that Skype was bought for 4 billions. Well, someone was smart and wise ;)
Let's suppose that softphone platforms are commodities. Is there a future for some sort of branding telephone services as a value added service ? Your favorite retailer or bank could provide you with telephone services in the future. Manufacturers of variouse devices could sell you device with telephony feature ?

Just some thoughts. We need still to get there. Best with open-sourced codecs in mind. Am I missing something or is it possible right now?

By now, Google Print is innocent

Having looking at the news that Google is sued by some authors, I run onto one really, really stupid story. Preston Gralla wrote, in my view, misleading article about whole issue over Google Print service.
I responded to Galla's article in the comment section. Here's my comment republished:

I have a web site, blogs etc. Everything's included there, I mean my essays, pictures and stuff are under copyright by default.
The law enables that. Fine.

My medium is internet and not paper books as in case of those authors. Since internet is in play, it's public place indexed by search engines. One of those search engines is Google who crawls my content and makes available when matched with some keywords for the internet searching. Yes, Google makes money enveloping these searches with ads.

So, Google figure it out to how to crawl content from other medium ( Books, remember ? ). He offers only small portion of the book's text and that's ''fair use'' . Still, no ads there yet, but could be in the future and links to publisher will be valuable as well. I presume only.
But, there's screem by those who are by intellectual property laws protected that this is bad behaviour and takes money away from their pockets.

Wrong, and misleading.

It actually makes for some of them branding, free word-of-mouth marketing, higher sales of their books and higher visibility.
The books are digitalized very easly these days, just like any piece of text.

So, stay current or die on the shelves ! Oh, acctually, suppose that some ot these, once famouse authors, are again in the spotlight ( imagine that) and interested because millions of people can access snipets of their work ( and locate it ) via some keywords and be interested to have copy of that book on their shelves.

Now, that's what I call ''value". Easy found book . I thinks that's the point. Google Print locates book I might be interested in. Insert the logic behind ''long tail'' concept ( I wonder why Amazon didn't started such service before , it has something similar ) . But, that could as well bring me to impulsive buying of books that are ''cat's in the bag'' !

Maybe Google Print will become some sort of public service, and use their power to make commercial service onto something related, although I doubt :))

Netvibes- MyWeb 2.0

Something on the latest web frontier is following>

netvibes.com

It's a personalized homepage I like so much.
It has AJAX-ed interface and works very fast. RSS feeds are the center of informational content .
Netvibes was started by small french team last week. They made it much better then MS with Start.com and Google with its personalized homepage.
This is truly amazing example of Web 2.0 concept ; web as a platform.
Netbvibes.com has a blog and wiki to get insight on the latest development.

I've been busy lately so light posting ahead. But netvibes.com is something I need it to announce.